MICRO-BIONIC

by First Last

Starting with the guerrilla media tactics of Industrial music in the late 1970s, the author charts an ongoing trend in electronic an increasing amount of sonic quality, recorded output and international contact, accomplished with a decreasing amount of tools, personnel, and capital investment. From the use of laptop computers to create massive avalanches of noise, to the establishment of micro-nations populated largely by sound artists, 21st century sound culture is expanding in its scope and popularity even as it shrinks in other respects. Numerous exclusive interviews with leading lights of the field were also conducted for this William Bennett (Whitehouse), Peter Christopherson (Throbbing Gristle / Coil), Peter Rehberg (Mego), John Duncan, Francisco López, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Bob Ostertag and many others weigh in with a diversity of thoughts and opinions that underscores the incredible diversity to be found within new electronic music itself.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Art

100 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2009

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm glad to have read this book, but I didn't love the act of reading it. It's about all kinds of avant-garde music that I enjoy (from Throbbing Gristle to the quieter-than-thou "micro-sound" movement, with detours made for Merzbow, Mego, synesthesia, Whitehouse, and The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland), and Bailey has an admirable wealth of knowledge and great research skills. That said, it was still a slog more often than not. While "Experimentalism Otherwise" (which I read at the same time, and loved) was written more in an academic, "dry" style, this book still got bogged down a lot more often. It felt compelled to explain away every possible criticism of each subgenre, which meant contradicting itself from chapter to chapter at times -- collector culture is bad, but Throbbing Gristle did it as art, so that was okay, and besides, you need to hear Francisco Lopez on an uncompressed CD rather than an MP3 -> except that MP3s are good because some artists given them away for free and people in developing nations can enjoy them -> and besides, there's no reason why sound has to be combined with physical object, that's just an outmoded concept from another era -> except that sometimes it's a really nice art edition and that's cool. It reminds me of when Derek Bailey used to change his opinion every few years about what constituted "pure" improvisation. At times, only a solo performance was true improv. Then it was duos, because there's the pure communication between two minds; solo is just wanking. But wait, no, group improv is the only true improv because that's the true egalitarian spirit of collaboration. etc.

It's good that the book got me riled up at times -- it's easy to fall into patterns of listening to what you like and what's easy for you (by which I mean me). I was glad to have certain assumptions challenged and to have to re-think my thoughts on certain forms of sound art. That's always good. That said, I think this book was trying to convince me to listen to a lot of drag-ass process music because it's slightly more radical than other related forms. For instance, Bailey decided that Pita is a more innovative artist than Fennesz because track 2 on "Get Out," and besides, "Endless Summer" is totally sentimental. Just check that title! Fair enough, but Fennesz's first album, "hotel para.lel" was significantly more abstract (and exciting!) than Pita's "Seven Tons for Free," its true contemporary chronologically. That Fennesz gets demerits for choosing to wrap his digital abstraction in melodic elements (something Pita has done to various degrees later on) seemed too much like that old (thoroughly disproven) saw about how Lennon's the real artist and McCartney just writes dumb pop songs.

Also, the assertion near the end of the book that file-sharing and the emphasis on enjoying sound for its own sake without the braggadocio of the "collection" to show off has brought us to some sort of pure information utopia was way off base. It suggests that only listening to downloaded music files will somehow put your closer to the music while reducing the collector's instinct, which is not how history has gone at all. It's human nature to want to hunt/gather and also to establish a sort of prestige from it. The kids today who don't buy records still have their dick-measuring contests in other ways, by showing off the contents of their hard drives on file sharing networks, or by being the first to find and upload a rare cassette to their MP3 blog. To be fair, the part about music files being available to poor and developing nations was an angle I hadn't thought of, and I'm glad for that, but the idea that getting rid of the relic will prevent people from gorging on search and acquisition doesn't match history, or the present day.

This is a worthwhile book, and there's an updated version of it (sold by the author himself) which I will pick up and compare to the original (it's going to be updated as well as being self-published -- better cover, too). There's also a second book titled "Unofficial Release," about the rise of recordings utilizing handmade or unconventional packaging methods.

[Orhan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really managed to develop an unjustified aversion towards this work. A lot of music which I thoroughly enjoy as it has given me transformative experiences (throbbing gristle, negativeland, the whole mego repertoire, Merzbow, or am actively indifferent to (whitehouse/Bennett in general, boyd rice) given an overwhelming defence, or criticism, but from the vantage point of self-aggrandising positivistic opinion, with no real overrarching theory to string his points together, apart from a nebulous anti-corporatism and the interrogation of modern alienation, where performance art becomes the gold standard of interrogation, rather than yet another reciprocal aspect of the spectacle, seen as the continued accumulation of a large mass of commodities, the so-called random and serial included.

Do I really care (or need to care) that William Bennett is suspicious of mysticism and Marxism, really? Does it concern me that the author thinks breakcore practitioners succumb to the hyperacceleration of the blitz of modern culture and are technophilic rather than utilitarian (I could cite just as much fairly austerely produced breakcore from the 90s which is just as percussively and concussively punishing as harsh noise whilst retaining complexity.) Does it even matter that Fenesz resorts to a melodic pastoralism and humanisation of tech in Endless summer as if delicate melodies are some kind of tranquilising narritive form in laptop music that needs to be spat upon by some inane petit-bourgeois rebel who picked up a Rage Against the (critics of the long KKK-Kesh Stronger) machine, cd in high school with his magic boy harry potter, merely to possess nothing of his own? Surely, Fenn o'berg makes a mockery out of these concerns?

And what the fuck are these histrionic rock 'n' roll libidinal desires even supposed to connote? "Messrs. Mumma and Lucier, to this writer’s knowledge, have never had
death threats directed at venues where they were scheduled to perform,
have never been physically attacked by militant feminists (or merely used
as the stylistic benchmark against which to propose more acceptably
'"feminine" forms of "noise")

Fantastic, an arts worth should now be judged by how much it follows the Brett Easton Ellis handbook. From transgression to Andrea Dworkin and Donald Trump. Such everlasting joy!

then we get declamatory statements like this, which, weren't they uttered earnestly, one would burst out laughing. "smiley-faced and often pill-besotted rave culture promised a new
communal, utopian current (Hakim Bey’s much-referenced ‘temporary
autonomous zone’), and brought with it a massive upsurge in the amount
of ecstatic electronic music available on the market - but precious little of it
attempted to, as Coil did, highlight the continuity between the
contemporaneous ‘eternal present’ of rave culture and its shamanic ancestry."

if you say so, Tom. Literally the whole public school crusty trust fund goa/psytrance scene was all about exoticised shamanism, and it was absolutely diabolical. This wasn't some small development, most people who talk about rave who are not initiated in the culture will wax lyrical about hallucinogen and (I mean I detest them on principle) Shpongle.

And, how can you simply blanket dismiss the rave culture consisting of psychedelic egotism when the darkside hardcore (which Reynolds and Matthew Ingram expertly defend) precisely occupied this chponic and queasy hinterland of inverted pleasure, and as Ingram said, it was ever the more potent precisely because it was not a calculated effort of art students tuned into john peel, but thrillingly, broadcast on pirate radio. And not content to produce an experiment, no, not at all, it corresponded to the functional satisfaction of a real decadent need for anxiety and terror. A hyperpolyrhythmic Bitches Brew of pressurised Can, James Brown and A Certain Ratio, protozoan darkside made on cheap akai samplers by kids on the estates beat the egghead experimentalists at their own game, precisely by using mainstream film samples and unsettling hollywood textures in common parlence, rather than endeavouring to preach to the already converted.

Ironically, I think the chapter on Merzbow is the best, precisely because the author is removed from the cultural context he is writing about, as an outsider, and can allow Merzbow and his Japanese cohorts to inhabit their own world and speak freely, rather than attempting to polemicise, albeit his assertion that merzbow's sheets of sound are formless is something I take umbrage with. Fluidity and form are not the same, as any good dialectician knows!

This book, I feel, illustrates the perils when bloggers, or those raised on the blogosphere, decide to furnish a veneer of high-falutin rhetoric, consume a load of multidisciplinary books from political science to cultural studies and information theory, but in such a way that would make a burgler flicking through a wad of banknotes envious. words don't make you big, brash or clever.

I would probably give this a 2.5 stars but goodreads does not permit that. Because the bibliography is well worth tapping up, and the author must be commended for assembling such a cornucopia of sources to peruse. It's just a shame he isn't able to suppress his urges to be a highly strung personal participant, in spite of the book giving off the vibe of being written by a university don.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 1 out of 5]

This has been kind of useful for chronological purposes. But what am I to make of hyperbole like this sentence on p. 61?

Balance looked especially unsettling … with blood dripping from his shaven temples, an effect that would have impressed even such celebrated madmen as Antonin Artaud.

Really?

And in the next paragraph:

…. every conceivable tone color of analog synthesizer from sepia-toned to glimmering silver.

Huh?

[Timm · Rating 3 out of 5]

This badly needed a proof-reading. Some chapters are better than others. Also, it's unfortunate and a bit misleading that Andrew MacKenzie is essentially a talking head - Hafler Trio music is not really discussed here.